McCain’s America

In the Washington Post, Michael Dobbs writes about the recent outbreak of hostilities in Georgia. Dobbs has a good amount of experience in the region, and he explains how Georgia played a big role in provoking this crisis, possibly at the encouragement of the Bush Administration. Russia’s response was overly aggressive, but despite our promises to Georgian president Saakashvili, there’s little to nothing we can do militarily to stop what’s happening.

John McCain’s electoral hopes are pinned on his abililty to breathe life into the dying myth that Republicans are “tougher” on foreign policy, and he certainly sees this crisis as a way to do so. He decided to send the Larry and Curly to his Moe out to Tbilisi to do whatever it is that they do when they travel closer to the countries they’re terrified of. But beneath the surface, this conflict brings out some of the glaring weaknesses in the Bush-McCain foreign policy playbook. It may sound like toughness, but in the end, our allies get kneecapped and fewer people around the world trust us.

David Kirkpatrick’s piece on McCain’s response to 9/11 and the “McCain Doctrine” should have been titled “McCain Repeatedly, Horribly Wrong on Virtually Everything About Iraq.” Kirkpatrick lays out several damning facts, but — frustratingly — makes the reader draw the most important conclusions.

Anyway, what’s frightening about McCain’s response to 9/11 is that it was basely entirely on false assumptions and the knee-jerk use of military force. But it’s more than simply that McCain was wrong about Iraq — lots of people were wrong about Iraq. What’s particularly troubling about McCain’s reaction is that his wrongness stemmed directly from the assumptions of his manichean worldview — assumptions he would bring with him to the White House.

In short, his is a world of good versus evil, where threatening and using force is always necessary, and where wildly diverse countries are lumped together as evil “autocracies.” No matter the country (Serbia, Iraq, Georgia), no matter the circumstances — the problem is always the same (evil), the solution always the same (threaten or use force).

The past decade has shown us how the dangers of this thinking – our belief that we must boil every issue and every conflict that arises in the world into a bi-polar good-vs-evil struggle and use force to combat that “evil” – has stretched our military to the breaking point and left us unable to address real threats. When you become locked in this mindset, and you and your allies are always the “good” in that equation, your view of the world becomes incredibly distorted. In the end, you begin to sound like a confused madman, chastising others for doing the exact same things that you’ve been doing yourself. But in your mind, it’s always justified because you are the “good” in the struggle against “evil.”

Over the past decade, the world has come to see this growing emptiness in our supposed moral authority, even if many Americans never question it. But one can’t cover their eyes with their hands and expect the entire world to become invisible. The Bush Administration has made America weak, and what we’ve been seeing in Georgia this month was Russia’s ability to exploit that weakness with ease.

But while endorsing another 4 years of this failed foreign policy mindset is bad enough, I’m not sure we’re thinking about how dangerous this is when the people in charge feel that the “evil” they’re fighting is lurking domestically as well. Speaking in front of the Urban League recently, John McCain said the following:

Answering a question about his approach to combatting crime, John McCain suggested that military strategies currently employed by US troops in Iraq could be applied to high crime neighborhoods here in the US. McCain called them tactics ‘somewhat like we use in the military…You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement.’ The way he described it, his approach sounded an awful lot like the surge.

Every large myth is supported by a series of smaller myths, and the myth of Republican foreign policy superiority is certainly no exception. The myth that the Surge was some magical tactic that single-handedly ended violence in Iraq is still around. For those who haven’t been keeping score, the drop in violence in Iraq started happening before the Surge, some of the most prominent reductions in violence happened in places where coalition troops left, and Baghdad is now a city of walls rather than a newly pacified urban area.

After everyone with the means to do so fled Baghdad for places like Syria and Jordan, the Iraqi capital city was turned into a series of ethnic prison enclaves in order to dampen the violence. I sure as hell hope this isn’t John McCain’s vision for solving inner city crime. But as Publius explained, for John McCain every problem is an “evil”, and every solution is to threaten or use force. Short of genocide, there’s no greater indication of an intent to use force than trying to turn the place where the “evil” resides into a giant prison, caging it inside.

America’s crime problem is certainly growing again. Mexico’s crime problem is a national crisis. And the amount of illegal immigration that occurs from Mexico is certainly fueled by the latter. While illegal immigrants, on the whole, commit less crime than legal immigrants or American citizens, the sensationalizing about their massive presence overshadows this and quickly drowns out the facts. And the presence of so many people in this country working and living outside the system will undoubtedly start to have serious societal repercussions if nothing is done.

There are two ways to attack these problems. One way involves understanding the roots of why these phenomena are happening, addressing those issues, and beginning to undermine the criminal gangs by going after how they make the money they need to survive. The other way involves seeing drug trafficking and illegal immigration as an amorphous evil that we must combat through brute force. For years we’ve tried the latter, and for years, we’ve watched these problems get worse and worse. In the end, many people have just thrown up their hands and said, “just build a wall,” but while that might work for a while in a city like Baghdad, it won’t work at all across a 2000 mile border. At some point, we need to get smarter, and that’s obviously not going to happen if we put John McCain in the White House.

In Southern California recently, one of the DEA agents carrying out a raid on a medical marijuana dispensary was seen wearing a Blackwater T-shirt. The picture was then removed from the L.A. Times website. No one knows why this agent was wearing it. Hell, he may have ordered the thing online. But the image reminded us that having a private security agency with little or no oversight like Blackwater enforcing the drug war, or enforcing our immigration laws, is a line no thicker than many of the other lines that the Republican Administration currently in power has crossed.

The growth of paramilitary police tactics throughout America is one of the scariest developments of this era. When someone like John McCain stands in front of us and says that he wants to “clamp down” on the violence in our cities and towns, too many of us still just assume that we won’t get caught in its grips. But tell that to someone like Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor Cheye Calvo, who had a SWAT team raid his home, terrorize his wife and mother-in-law, and shoot his two dogs for no reason, all because someone randomly addressed a package of marijuana to his house as part of a drug trafficking scheme. Tell that to people like Cory Maye and Ryan Frederick, two young men with no criminal records who awoke to the sound of people breaking into their house at night, reacted by shooting at the intruders, only to realize they’d killed police officers and might have to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

Whether it’s halfway across the world, or in our own backyard, the idea that our power and authority does not come with any form of accountability or responsibility – simply because we are “good” fighting against “evil” – is rapidly eroding the trust in that power and authority. The Bush Administration’s hypocrisy between the Kosovo and the South Ossetia situations shares a common denominator with the hypocrisies over how America fights crime domestically. It starts with a belief that a desire for autonomy can be a dangerous thing if it’s viewed as running counter to that larger struggle.

But the battle for autonomy is the larger struggle. There’s no greater representation of democracy than having the ability to express your desires freely. George Bush and John McCain often say they understand this, and that they’re “spreading democracy,” but by their actions, it’s very clear that they don’t, and they aren’t. And the most dangerous thing we can do right now is to take another 4 years to learn how the failed approach of our foreign policy also fails when applied right here on our own streets.

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One way involves understanding the roots of why these phenomena are happening

A wingnut is pathologically incapable of this. The solution is always knee-jerk:

apply harsh violence – imprison.

The harsh violence gives them their jollies from the evening news on TV and the prison is a corrupt means of extracting cheap labor profits from non-violent offenders. Wingnuts of course believe these profits will “trickle on” to them. Yeah sure, at the bargain bins at Wal-Mart maybe.

I’ve said before, the crisis in Georgia was one of escalating military action. It started out as a conflict between seperatists of Russian descent in conflict with the central Georgian authorities. The Georgians thought they could clamp down despite the presence of Russian peace-keeping troops, the Russians took it as an opportunity to send a message to all the former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact members – “The U.S. is weak now, tied up in Iraq and Afganistan, and unable to help you militarily. We, on the other hand, are just across your border. It is more important to your survival that you get along with us, than it is for you to get friendly with the U.S.”

The fact that we got to this point shows the weakness of the Bush foreign policy. It has it’s parrallels in post-WWII history – the U.S. encouragement of anti-communist revolution in Hungary, only to have the U.S. watch helplessly the brutal Soviet crackdown which the U.S. was powerless to counter.

The Soviets also faced similar problems, when their own problems in Afganistan left them unable to counter the Polish Solidarity movement militarily as they did in Checkoslovakia just a decade earlier. Some say that was the “crack in the wall” of the iron curtain, resulting in it’s breakup a decade later and the collapse of the Soviet Union just a few short years after that. So the current Russian government can appreciate the vulnerability of the current U.S. situation.

The U.S. military, if not broken, is badly worn out and over-extended. As the Iraq war has become an unpopular long-term policing action, far fewer young people are willing to volunteer, especially after seeing limited-time enlistments being extended indefinately. The National Guard and Reserves are going to suffer the most over the next generation, as young people remember seeing 50-year old guardsmen being sent to Iraq to further a policy which was erronious from the start and poorly executed thereafter. That’s not a dig at the military, which did what it was trained and equipped to do – defeat the Iraqi Army with few casualties and in a remarkably small amount of time. The modern American military simply doesn’t have the resources, training, or temperment to be long-term occupiers of countries with populations hostile to our presence.

The vulnerability of the U.S. is not only militarily, however. Our biggest problem is that diplomatically, we no longer hold the high ground. We have no credibility, and even our allies consider us more of a liability than an asset. When Bush lectures Russia about the sanctity of international borders, it just brings scuffows of derisive laughter from across the world, as the Russians just repeat back to us the “Bush Doctrine” that they have the right to protect their vital interests even if it involves pre-emptive military action across their borders.

What’s most important in this situation is the danger caused by escalation. Remember that it was an assasin who killed an Austrian Duke in the Balkins that resulted in WWII. As foreign powers take sides in this type of dispute, the situation threatens to spiral out of control, well beyond the ability of the major powers to stop it.

So at a time like this, the last thing you need is for someone to do some sabre-rattling, and to bluff and bluster and threaten military action. You need calm and collected leaders who will cool nationalist passions, engage in carefull and long-term diplomacy, use their good name and offices to urge fighting parties away from the brink and back to the negotiating table.

Unfortunatly, we have George W. Bush, who has no international credibility at all. The only saving grace is that he already seems to be packing his bags and more or less on vacation until the end of his term. But in his “absence” we also have John McCain, who also seems more than willing to fan the fires of war if he thinks it will help him politically. That’s NOT the type of leadership we need in this type of crisis.

Dobbs has a good amount of experience in the region, and he explains how Georgia played a big role in provoking this crisis, possibly at the encouragement of the Bush Administration.

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The fact of the matter is if Georgia had been a member of NATO the US and Europe would have been dragged into a war that clearly was the result of decisions they had little control over. Saakashvili’s decision to launch a campaign against Tskhinvali was inane since it was a war he could never win without US military help – and that was never going to happen. The events in Georgia are not just about local issues there but the larger geopolitical backdrop of Kosovo and NATO’s expansion around Russia’s borders. Russia sent a message and NATO, despite the recent “unified” stance, will be more reticent than ever to invite Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO with energy supplies and a war in the Caucasus at stake.

McCain’s (and Bush’s) dual-ism approach to foreign policy is straight out of the 1950’s, as Dobbs mentions. For decades they saw the U.S. as the leader of a multi-national bulwark against the evil expansion of communism. Now that the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union has collapsed, and China has become merely a capitalist totalitarian regime, they need a evil empire to confront. To provide that nemisis, they founded the “Global War on Terror”.

But the situation was never as simple as that. In Vietnam we blundered into what was essentially a civil war between the Catholic elite who had been the French administrators, and the Buddist peasants who the French administrators had regularly trodden upon. Yet we bought the argument that we were protecting freedom-loving Vietnamese from foreign communist agitators. Sure, they were communists, but only after the Truman government turned their back on them after WWII and the communists offered the only support for independence from France (and later the U.S.).

Likewise, in dealing with Islamic countries, Bush and McCain and his ilk don’t understand (or don’t care) that our military presence actually feeds the anti-U.S. forces there, rather than solves the problems. It’s hard to get people to kill themselves in order to kill a few Americans if you don’t see them. But if you put them in close proximity, have them searching houses and manning checkpoints, and have the occassional accidental shooting of innocent civilians, it’s easy to portray them as brutal occupiers.

“It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.”

@5 I think much of the disconnect is that in the 1950s, the aftermath of World War II had made much of the world convinced that America was good, and was a clear moral authority in the world. But we, as a nation at that time, also had a much better understanding of what it was that made us good. Today, the Republicans still want that “we are good – our enemies are evil” dichotomy, but they refuse to take ownership of the massive adherence to morality and justice that actually brought that about back then.

Vietnam, to me, seems to be when that disconnect started to happen, when people started to become blind to that vital connection between moral authority and that responsibility that goes with it.

@6: Lee I agree and the bush adminsitration has wasted the moral authority we had after 9/11. The rest of the world no longer views us as “good” after the obviously unnecessary invasion of Iraq, the torture of prisoners, Abu Ghraib prison abuses, the Balckwater mess and the domestic assaults on individual liberty and justice. We no longer can muster allies, gather freinds and stop evil in the world. We lost our credibility with Colin Powell at the UN and we have over-extended our military. Evan a second rate power like Russia is not afraid to tweak our nose – because they know we can’t do anything about it. That is why Bush/McCain has made us weak – and other countries also notice that we have not even pursued Bin Laden – who attacked us on 9/11 – instead using it as a pretext to go into Iraq.

We have no moral authority now when we proclaim that the “sovereign borders” of Georgia should not be violated – we violated the borders of Iraq, even though it was no threat to us.

@10 Yeah, the word isolationist can mean different things to different people. At an extreme, it’s no good because it ends up trying to subvert market forces that can’t (and shouldn’t) be subverted. I don’t think that’s what you’re advocating – I took your response to be just a general acceptance that it’s not our role to impose our will on others, nor is that necessary to promote democracy (in fact, it’s counter-productive to that end).

Saakashvili’s decision to launch a campaign against Tskhinvali was inane since it was a war he could never win without US military help – and that was never going to happen.

Saakashvilli obviously believed otherwise.

And we shouldn’t be surprised. The Georgian government is steeped in what Publius calls a “manichean” world view. Combine that with absolutely disastrous confusion of intent coming from the U.S. and you get what appears to be “inane”.

Lee, you made a good point. I can even see rhp6033’s position. But I do think we should assist a fledgling democracy when the people in that country want it. The issue is how best to accomplish that task.

And you have Obama’s recent drop in numbers across the country, something that has Democrats very worried, especially as superdelegates _switch back_ to Clinton and away from Obama. Many believe they have selected the wrong candidate!

Scary as the thought may be, but I agree with you, Puds. We should help fledgling democracies whenever possible. But when they do something as utterly stupid as piss off the neighborhood bully (or bear, in this case), just get the fuck out of the way! Whether or not certain American elements had convinced Saakshvili (who, if you’ve seen the videos of him chewing his tie on YouTube, may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer) that he’d be backed up is pretty much irrelevant. The Georgians screwed the pooch, and the only responsibility the US should have is that of aiding and assisting in the reconstruction and helping the citizenry.

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